Shipping’s safety record continues to improve, but training needs to keep in pace with the technological advances which are designed to increase safety and efficiency, say Christian Dwyer, Global Head of Admiralty, and Donal Keaney, Senior Marine Manager, at international legal and professional services firm Ince.
Total losses have declined by 57% over the past decade, according to Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty’s 2022 Safety and Shipping Review. This positive trend is the result of industry wide efforts to improve safety, and these efforts should be commended, but we should also be aware that ship assets and seafarers face evolving risks, particularly with the uptake of digital technologies. There is no time to rest comfortably on past success: there are still lessons we can learn.
The implementation of Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS) is a good place to start. Changes to SOLAS Chapter V “Safety of Navigation” entered into force on 1 January 2011, initiating the roll out of mandatory installation of ECDIS and Bridge Navigation Watch Alarm Systems (BNWAS).
There is no doubt that this has been a positive safety development, despite some accident investigators implicating ECDIS misuse, particularly in the early years of its implementation, but also more recently. Take, for example, the 2019 Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) investigation of the grounding of an Australian Border Force cutter on a reef. The investigators cited underlying safety issues with the effectiveness of ECDIS type-specific training, ECDIS software updates and the use of a single point feature on electronic navigational charts to represent relatively large physical features.
More recently, the UK Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) and Danish Maritime Accident Investigation Board ‘Application and Useability of ECDIS’ study, which was published in September 2021, concluded that while effective use of ECDIS did contribute to safe navigation, its introduction has been problematic. MAIB has highlighted that in grounding cases, officers might have attended ECDIS training and completed ECDIS familiarisation, but they are still not competent or confident operating the system, especially in terms of critical safety settings.
Clearly, there is on-going work to be done on ensuring the effective use of ECDIS, but we must also learn from why this is needed, because digitalisation at sea is rapidly expanding into every aspect of seafarers’ tasks.
As a system can only be as effective as its users, training should go beyond ticking off the equipment manufacturers’ manual checklist and perhaps even beyond the training mandated by the IMO. Yet, the fragmented and diverse nature of training programs for digital systems has meant that there is no best practice benchmark for ship operators and their crews to aspire to. Similarly, there is a lack of knowledge sharing between ship operators and training organisations about what approaches work well in real life and what the practical challenges are.
Taking a specific MAIB investigation as an example of these real-life challenges, the 2016 grounding of a bulk carrier was partly attributed to the low level of alertness of the second officer – the incident occurred at 0248 – and the investigators also noted: “The disablement of the ECDIS alarms removed the system’s barriers that could have alerted the second officer to the danger in time.” The disabling of alarms is a well-known issue, affecting not only ECDIS, highlighting a potential mismatch between theory and practice that we have yet to overcome.
It is also important that training builds a seafarer’s trust in the new systems being introduced. Otherwise, we will have instances such as the 2020 grounding of a chemical tanker in Scotland. The MAIB investigation concluded in this case that: “The grounding happened because the bridge team relied on locally produced survey data that did not show a boulder obstruction near the pier. This survey data appeared to the crew to be reliable and accurate, so was preferred to the ECDIS data, which did show the obstruction.”
With the potentially incremental move towards autonomous shipping, the role of navigation will take on new, and different, importance. The industry would benefit greatly from close collaborationand ensuring standardisation when implementing new digital applications to mitigate the risks and realise the full potential of digital technology.
Is legislation evolving quickly enough to support this? This is a question that should be constantly asked as digitalisation gains pace. The International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) should be reviewed to ensure that it reflects the new realities and needs of operators and their crews. Similarly, Ince believes that the SOLAS Convention will require updating to reflect future advances in the digitalisation of vessels and the impact this will have on vessel safety standards.
Shipping’s destiny is intertwined with its ability to digitalise operations effectively and responsibly. It is intrinsic to so many critical issues, including sustainability, operational safety, crew well-being and commercial viability, that the industry simply can’t afford to take a one-dimensional view of how technologies are applied.
Re-imagining training strategies and implementation to reflect a new digital era will not just keep operators and seafarers out of the courtroom, it will smooth the pathway to a truly sustainable future where operations are optimised, crew’s safety and wellbeing is protected, and the industry is a beacon for responsible investment.
The views presented hereabove are only those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of SAFETY4SEA and are for information sharing and discussion purposes only.
